


The Usual Hauntings

by Maester_Aemon_Heterodyne



Series: The Coming of the End [4]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Magic, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 10:16:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10897248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maester_Aemon_Heterodyne/pseuds/Maester_Aemon_Heterodyne
Summary: When a trip to the bathroom at Sunnydale High takes a turn for the crazy, Dawn makes a new friend, and the two of them must work together to escape the high school's basement while being hunted by and evil spirit.The fourth story of the Coming of the End. Please note that the Coming of the End stories are meant to be read in order, and generally lead one to the next, so if you haven't read the previous installment(s) in the series, the following isn't likely to make a great deal of sense.





	The Usual Hauntings

There was something about the musty smell of erasers and old books that made sleep seem right around the corner, never more than a poorly timed blink of the eyes away. Dawn could feel the soft lull of unconsciousness nearly drawing her out of her chair as her new English teacher Ms Ferguson droned and prattled on and on and on about words, and grammar, and something else that might have been important if Dawn had actually been able to focus on anything but keeping herself from drooling. As it was, she was doing better than a good many people in the class.

Middle school might have been dull, but Dawn really hadn’t expected to take Ferris Bueller quite so seriously about high school.

Soon enough, at least, the third period bell would ring, freeing her from this place of unbearable boredom. The clock read 11:55. Just five more minutes…

Finally, after three eternities and and about half a forever, the irritatingly perky bell chimed, releasing the many captives back into the wild. Dawn could have wept. As it was, she simply grinned like an idiot, and made her way to the bathroom. Resting her head at the angle she did had left her eyeshadow smudged, and this was not a thing of the good, especially for the first day of school. 

Despite the pristine brand-newness of it, the first floor ladies’ room already smelled worse than a porta-potty. She’d have to make this quick. She hustled over to the mirror and took off her backpack, fumbling through it to find her eyeshadow.

Something caught her eye though: as she worked, something on the ground behind her stood out from the pristine tiles of the floor. Pausing for a moment, then turning, she saw what looked rather like a bundle of sticks tied with cloth. Dawn’s curiosity took over without her really noticing, and she went to investigate. It turned out, in fact, to be exactly what it looked like: a small bundle of sticks and cloth.

Except for the face. Dawn hadn’t seen that at first. Its eyes were mismatched buttons, one larger and differently coloured than the other one, and its mouth a frown of stitches. Very creepy. Even so, Dawn couldn’t really help herself, and reached out to pick it up. The moment she did though, the whole room started shaking, knocking her on her butt.

Hailing as she did from southern California, Dawn knew earthquakes, and this didn’t feel like a proper earthquake. The floor itself felt like it was wobbling, or melting. Quite suddenly, it all stopped, though one of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling popped and sparked.

As she got back on her feet, one of the stalls on the end burst open, and a small, panicked, strangely familiar-looking girl with colourfully highlighted blonde hair stumbled out, still yanking her jeans up. She ran stumbling towards the exit, then shrieked, and screamed, “Where’s the door!?”

“What do you mean, where’s the door?” Dawn asked, making her own way there after recovering her purse. She saw, however perfectly well what Hair-dye girl meant: the door was gone, smoothly-tiled wall standing in its place. They were trapped. Fighting down her own panic, Dawn turned around. “Maybe there’s a window, or something,” she said, her voice cracking.

When she checked the whole bathroom, no windows were in evidence. She almost had time to redouble her panic before the shaking began again, worse than before. All the lights soon flickered or exploded. Hair-dye girl screamed louder than ever. _Christ,_ she thought, _touching strange dolls is really not a good idea. I should’ve known._

The ground warped, wobbled, cracked, and finally split, dropping Dawn through it into the darkness beneath.

 

Something was jostling her. Dawn could really feel was a sort of all-encompassing soreness, and someone jostling her by the shoulder, which made it worse there. _Wake up, wake up, wake up,_ a voice kept repeating. Gradually, her memory and ability to think returned, and she started to move.

She opened her eyes to find herself in a dimly lit and musty-smelling hallway. Above her knelt the girl with hair highlights, her panicked eyes visibly reddened even in the gloom. The girl gave a deep sigh of relief as Dawn began to stir. “Thank god,” she said. “I thought you weren’t ever going to wake up.”

“I’m okay, I think. Was I out long?” Dawn asked, coughing in the dusty air.

"Just a couple minutes, I think. Maybe more. I was out too."

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” said the other girl. “I think we’re under the school. Under the bathroom, remember?” 

Dawn looked up, but the ceiling showed no signs of having just recently shattered. “Yeah, that makes sense.” Wasn’t a sure thing though. Whatever that doll thing had been in the bathroom, it was magic alright, and there was no knowing where magic was concerned. 

“What was that? That was like, some supernatural shit right? With vampires and the mayor and stuff?” the other girl asked.

“How… how do you know about all that?” Dawn asked, somewhat taken aback. She hadn’t expected that Hair-dye chick would know about any of the magical happenings of the town, especially with the way most people denied what they saw. 

“My sister told me about it. She got bitten by a vampire when the mayor went snake, and now mom and dad won’t let her in the house, but she sends me letters sometimes. She hasn’t really changed since she got bitten,” the girl said.

Finally, the connections sort of fell into place in Dawn’s mind. That was why she’d thought the girl familiar. She lacked her sister’s sneer, but none of her good looks. “You’re _Harmony’s_ sister?”

“Yeah. I’m Lizzie,” she said. “Lizzie Kendall.”

“Dawn Summers,” said Dawn, crawling to her feet. Checking her phone, she saw that there was no reception wherever here was.

“Oh! Like Buffy Summers? That slayer chick my sister talks about all the time? Is she your sister?”

Dawn sighed. “Yeah. And yes, it’s magic, I think. Have you seen anything since you got up?”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t even heard anything. This place is too quiet, it gives me the creeps…”

“Me too, Lizzie. I think we should start looking for a way of whatever this is.” Dawn began by looking intently along the corridor in both directions, but either path was near-identical. It didn’t really look like it mattered where they went. “Lets’ go left,” Dawn decided on a whim.

“Okay, I guess,” Lizzie said after a moment, the doubt in her voice obvious, but she didn’t argue. The girls took off slowly and silently down the dark hall.

They passed a couple of locked doors on the way to wherever it was they were going, labelled as “Maintenance 1” or “Storage 3”, indicating that they probably were, in fact, under the school, but beyond that, the hallway turned a couple of times, never leading anywhere conclusive.

Finally, there came an end to the hallway, and with it, an open door marked “Boiler Room 2”. Dawn knew however from Xander's blueprints that there was only one boiler room under Sunnydale High. This one was likely to be empty, or something else entirely, merely masked as a boiler room. “Well, there’s a nice break, I guess. C’mon, let’s check it out,” she said. Lizzie wavered, and seemed like she was going to argue, but like before, never quite got there, followed Dawn hesitantly into the room.

The inside of the room was mostly empty, at least for its impressive size, and filled with obviously magical crap strewn about like a bomb had gone off. Feathers, sticks, leaves, claws, roots, flower petals, bones, bits of cloth and other fabrics, and bits of glass covered the floor, and in one corner several crates had been overturned. There were more arcane odds and ends scattered about near them, suggesting that most of the magical accoutrement had come from there originally. All in all, it looked to Dawn like the place had been ransacked in search of something. There was also a low humming or whirring. Something like a distant fan, maybe.

“Is that like, witchcraft stuff?” Lizzie asked, seemingly more curious than afraid.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Dawn.

"So, witches are really real, too?"

“Yup. I live with one, actually. Looks like whoever was here was interrupted. Let’s see if we can’t find out what they were up to.”

That didn’t take as long as she had thought it might. Drawn in dried blood on the floor on the other side of the room was what Dawn recognised immediately as a summoning circle. It had been broken, and so was probably just a drawing now. Though her limited knowledge of the art didn’t tell her what it actually summoned, she knew dark magics when she saw them, and whatever this was, it was dark like a miles-underground cavern at midnight with a new moon in winter. She didn’t mention any of that, however. “Definitely witchcraft. Don’t worry, the circle’s been broken, so it probably won’t hurt us,” she stated, with an air of casualness she hoped would show confidence.

Apparently it did. "Oh. Okay. That's blood, right?" Lizzie asked. With a start, she jerked her head around, and her cautious curiosity became fear. "Did you hear that?"

Dawn, who had not, shook her head and continued to investigate, but found few other concrete clues. Something, like maybe a spellbook of some kind, would have been nice, but nothing in the room was so forthcoming. The ingredients she saw were too common and too numerous to be for any specific purpose she could see, so they were probably just part of a stash that someone had gathered here and then drawn from. As she perused, it occurred to her gradually that something was wrong. The low whirring noise was distinctly louder now. The air was alive with it. Something was still there, or was soon coming back. Lizzie noticed it too, and was muttering something profane under her breath.

“We need to get out of here,” Dawn said, making a hurried exit from the room.

“Oh yeah, NOW you notice!” yelled Lizzie. Dawn rushed to her, grabbed her hand, and the pair flew from Boiler Room 2 as swiftly as their feet, or rather Lizzie’s three-inch heels, could carry them.

Once they were out, they closed the door behind them, and locked it from the inside. Not that that would help. It did make them feel better, though. Inside, the humming, now a distinct roar, turned into an almost human scream. Dawn shuddered. She _really_ didn’t want to meet whatever could scream like that. 

Quite suddenly, the scream dropped off. After a moment even the low humming of before was gone too. Dawn didn’t care to stick around any longer, though. Whatever that was could easily come back. “What say we go to other end of the hall?”

Lizzie nodded vigorously. “Way ahead of you there.”

Going the other direction proved almost immediately more fruitful than the one that Dawn and Lizzie had first chosen. After passing the maintenance and storage rooms they’d already encountered, they found a door labelled “Stairs to First Floor." It was locked, naturally, so they kept moving.

A few seconds later they passed an open room filled with cardboard boxes and a couple of hand-trucks.

After no more than maybe a hundred paces from where they’d woken up, they reached an end in the hall. To the left and right were pathways, both identical, and both dark and unsettling, much as the one they were on already. Since they’d had better luck taking the right the first time, Dawn and Lizzie opted for right again.

The hall was rather short. After a turn to the left, it terminated in an open door marked “Miscellaneous Storage”. The door was slightly jar, and had most of a bloody hand print on the side. The frame had been wrecked where someone had forced their way in. More likely than not, by the same person who left the bloody prints. Dawn was curious, and since the blood was dried, it didn’t seem too dangerous to take a peek inside. Whoever had done this was probably gone. Looking to Lizzie, more to warn her than to ask permission, she gave the door a gentle nudge with her foot.

The door swung smoothly and silently, revealing a partially lit room filled with shelves, boxes, machines, carts, crates, and for no reason that Dawn could think of a thick six-foot-long bundle of chicken wire. It was fairly spacious, if cluttered, and much of it lay out of sight. Given that the only way out they’d seen was locked, there really wasn’t much to do but go inside and see if there was anything useful. Maybe a wall phone, or something. She looked to Lizzie again, who after a tense moment steeled herself and moved to follow Dawn.

Once inside, it became clear that “Miscellaneous Storage” really meant what it said: many of the boxes and shelves were quite normal, containing cameras, electrical equipment, drywall, power tools, textbooks, and other stuff one might find in a school basement. However, all around the room were unopened crates marked ‘fragile’ with shipping labels from all over the world, small, heavy black canisters with Chinese chicken-scratch writing on the side, murky specimen jars, a stack of blank parchment with quill pens and ink, books obviously not destined for any normal library, glass water bottles and some that looked like wine, a large box full of enormous shark teeth, and other weird and unintelligible containers and objects.

One crate a ways in had been broken into. Wood fragments were strewn about the floor around it, and there were bloody handprints on the sides. Dawn looked inside, but there was nothing there except for more bloodied wood fragments.

“What the hell happened here?” Lizzie asked, breaking the nearly stifling silence.

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know?” a voice answered. Dawn jumped straight out of her skin and Lizzie shrieked loudly. “Hear that? That’s the niblet, all coming to school like the sis.”

Dawn knew that voice. Besides, that was her nickname. A chill went down her spine, but even so, her spirits lifted like a Saturn Five. Dawn wanted to hug him, even with the blood., and also slap him, but mostly hug him. He'd come _home!_  But what on Earth was he doing here of all places? “Spike?”

Out from behind a box rose the bleach-haired vampire in all his glory. His hands were rather bloodied, and had been bandaged inexpertly. That explained the box and the hand prints. His half-open black button-down revealed a number of nasty and still bleeding gashes across his chest.

“Oh my god! That’s Spike?” Lizzie exclaimed, finally unafraid. She was obviously familiar, and now in her element, more or less. Of course, she would be. “He’s the Spikey Harm keeps talking about?”

“ _Your_ sister? But you’re-” Spike cut himself off, as if realising what he was seeing. His cool blue eyes narrowed. “No no no! No more visitors today!” he shouted. He turned away and walked around a shelf, disappearing.  

Dawn was stunned, and utterly confused. Why had he come back? Where had he even gone? Is this where he’d been all that time? “Wait!” she shouted after him. “Spike! Where are you going?”

“No! No! No! Nope nope nope! No more! Nothing here!” came his voice, sounding distressed.

Dawn went after him. She turned his corner, and found him standing with his back to her. His bloodied fists rested on the wall in front of him. “Spike?” she said again, more softly than before.

Spike turned around slowly. Now that she could see them more clearly, she realised that his eyes were tired and unfocused. Confusion and fear were evident in his expression. Worse, however, were his injuries, which looked eerily like claw marks. Maybe they were. “What happened to you?” she said, looking at his wounds.

Spike looked her in the eyes, where some clarity seemed to return, brought his hand to his chest briefly, then lowered it and looked away. “I… I tried… tried to cut it out… They put the spark in me! The burning spark! I had to cut it out!”

Cut out what? His own unbeating heart? What could possibly have made him want to do that? And what was the spark? “Wh- what about your hands?”

“A spell. I saw a spell on the ground. Someone trying to summon a spirit. Revenge spirit, nasty things. Broke the circle, but it was already there,” he said. “Chased me out. I hit it, but it hurt me.” That explained the boiler room.

“Revenge demon?” Lizzie asked.

“Spirit, pet, not demon. Evil ghosty from beyond the grave, come to eat you. What else?”

“Eat me?”

“Yeah. Or, someone, at least. Maybe not you." Spike's mouth curled into a creepy, distant smile." If you’re lucky maybe it’s that sister of yours.”

After a quiet moment, Dawn spoke up. “Spike? Can you help us defeat it?”

His unfocused expression returned. “No, can’t help you bit. I’m not leaving. Can’t leave, can’t leave.” He turned back to the wall, muttering that short mantra, but after a moment, as if realising that the girls hadn’t moved, pointed to a shelf behind them.

Dawn went over to the shelf and found there a somewhat blood-stained old book. It was written in really weird old-timey English, labelled “Algernon’s Great Booke of Magicks and Alchemical Innovashins”. A spellbook then, presumably one useful in defeating the spirit. Dawn touched it cautiously, and, when no doom fell upon her, decided it was safe to pick up. She turned back to Spike once it was safely stored in her backpack. “Why are you down here?”

“Down here? Always been down here. Where else would I be? When all the world is shit, and I made it all that way? Now go! Leave us. I don’t want any more visitors. No more! Shoo!” he yelled, gesturing forcefully towards the door.

Though desperately wishing to protest, Dawn thought better of going at him like this, and so turned and made a slow exit, looking back worriedly at him several times on her way. Lizzie followed her out, visibly confused.

“So… that was really Spike?” Lizzie asked once they left the confines of his storage room.

“Yeah. He’s not usually like that though. Something’s happened to him.” And that was sure as hell the truth. The encounter had left Dawn a little shaken. Should she tell Buffy? Maybe she’d know what to do. However, that implied getting out of the basement, which she realised now she’d neglected to ask Spike about. She and Lizzie would have to defeat whatever this demon was on their own, and then figure out a way to escape.

“So, um, Dawn, how are we going to get out of here? Is that thing going to come after us? Is it going to eat us like Spike said?”

“I don’t know, Lizzie. Here's one way to find out, though,” Dawn said. She sat down against the wall, withdrawing the old spellbook from her pack.

Lizzie shuffled her feet nervously. “Really? That book gives me the creeps,” she said.

“Yeah, well, it beats being eaten, doesn’t it?”

Lizzie acquiesced after a long moment, and sat down beside Dawn. “Alright. Um, what exactly are we looking for?”

“Revenge spirits, probably. Like Spike said. If not, maybe we’ll recognise the summoning circle somewhere in here.” She didn’t hold out too much hope on that account, however. The ancient tome was probably a solid four inches thick, and the circle had been a bit damaged because of Spike. Dawn decided against mentioning it.

Fortunately, that worry turned out to be entirely unnecessary. Not only was there a table of contents, someone had very helpfully dog-eared a page titled ‘Howe To Exact Reveange Useing The Spirits Of The Recently Slane”. The page also contained detailed drawings of the circle from the boiler room, and instructions on casting the summoning spell.

Even better than that, though, was the passage at the bottom of the page, which said that the way to get rid of a spirit was to first add your blood to a circle, then pour holy water on it. There wasn’t even any chanting or hard-to-find flowers or demon body parts like usual. 

“That was really easy,” Dawn remarked. “Usually, research into this kind of thing takes days, and lots of caffeine.”

“So, all we have to do is give some blood and use some holy water?”

“”Well, yeah, looks like it.”

“Um, Dawn, do you have any holy water?”

That was a point Dawn had not considered. Typically, holy water was not something in any short supply to the Scoobies, but Dawn had not thought to bring any to school with her when she would be in broad daylight the whole time. “No. I mean, here in Sunnydale, maybe I should, like, carry some in a mace can. But hey, there was a whole bunch of magic supplies on the floor in the boiler room, maybe there’s some holy water there!”

Lizzie still looked skeptical. “Why? If holy water is supposed to destroy the spirit, why would whoever summoned it have some just lying around?”

Dawn’s face felt warmer and warmer with each passing moment. “I don’t know! Maybe they wanted a failsafe, you know, just in case something went wrong? Maybe it just came with a standard kit? Maybe they were worried about vampires. I mean, this is underground. We kinda have to chance it. Unless you’ve got some holy water with you, of course.”

“My sister’s a vampire! Why would I carry holy water?”

“If harmony was my sister, I’d carry the stuff in gallon jugs everywhere I went!”

Lizzie laughed a full laugh, not just a giggle or nervous haha, leaving her fear momentarily behind. She had a decidedly pleasant laugh, clear and warm and sweet, so utterly unlike Harmony's. “Good point. I guess you’re right though, we’ll have to chance it.”

Dawn got up and returned the old tome to its resting place in her backpack. “Alright then. To the boiler room?”

Lizzie followed her up. “To the boiler room,” she said. Her face was awash with doubt, but now there was a twinkle of excitement there too.

The Boiler Room was silent as a crypt when they got there. Nothing was obviously disturbed from before, though with the room so disheveled already that didn't really mean much. Dawn knew better than to waste time in situations like this though. She made strait for the box of magical supplies and began rooting through it, searching for holy water and potentially for some pre-donated blood. Lizzie, after a brief hesitation, started looking through the scattered supplies that littered the floor. 

Now that she was paying attention to what supplies were there, she realised that her crazy guess about a standard kit was remarkably accurate. Dried roses, crow and canary feathers, essence of wolfsbane, salt, sugar, sulfur, saltpeter, ginger, garlic, iron filings, pine needles and cones, olive oil, newt eyes, frog eggs, foxglove, bladderwort, chicken bones, various crystals, and rosemary were all standard reagents, useful for all manner of magics. One little container of reptile scales even had a Magic Box price tag still attached. Despite all the variety of ingredients, her hopes for holy water were diminishing: holy water, though common in its use against vampires, was otherwise inert, magically speaking, and wasn't used much in magic. Tara had taught her that last year when she'd asked about what else holy water could do, if it were so powerful against vampires, and had been disappointed to hear that the great magic foil of the undead was basically just water anywhere else. 

After some minutes of rooting through the box, she began to accept that there simply was no holy water there. Since probably half of what had originally been in the box was strewn about the room, there was still a good chance that there was holy water here somewhere, but Dawn's hopes weren't high for it. She looked around for Lizzie. "Nothing here," she said. "You?" 

"Jack all out here," Lizzie replied. "Is it possible to make holy water?" 

"Not without a priest, or a nun." 

"No chance you're secretly a nun, then?"

"Nope." Yet the notion of making holy water had given Dawn an idea. Tara had also elaborated on what holy water actually did, which was represent life by channeling positive energy when exposed extremely unholy, like a vampire. She'd told her that there were other ways of doing the same thing, but with more standard ingredients. Dawn couldn't remember anything more of that conversation, though. She hadn't paid much attention to the specifics of life-symbolism, but she thought blood might have been involved, which was okay since blood was already a component of the spell they wanted. 

"Hey, Lizzie!" she called. 

"What?"

"Maybe we don't need holy water. We might be able to wing it with other stuff." In complete honesty, Dawn didn't know if they'd be able to find the right materials for a substitute here either, but at least they had a better chance of it. 

"You can do that?" 

"I think so," Dawn said. "Let's check the book, maybe it has something we can use." 


End file.
